A video of a truck laying a road is hardly scintillating stuff but a video of just that in Western Australia has sent the local council's social media metrics into the stratosphere.
The footage shows a 4.9 kilometre section of road being laid on Airstrip Road – which leads to the town's airfield. Shot by drone, the footage has since been viewed 14 million times and shared 361,000 times.
The footage shows a 4.9 kilometre section of road being laid on Airstrip Road – which leads to the town's airfield. Shot by drone, the footage has since been viewed 14 million times and shared 361,000 times.
Not a bad result for the Shire of Moora's Facebook page, which aims to provide regular information to its 2000 residents, and jumped to 58,000 followers nearly overnight.
It's a clear reminder of the pull of seemingly mundane tasks in your day-to-day work environment which can in fact generate huge interest.
With that in mind, here's five pointers about the value of visually capturing activities and operations in your workplace.
1. Create a visually aware culture within your organisation
Educate and increase awareness within your organisation about a renewed push to create video content. It's critical this gets to your front-line staff as they are the ones who tend to get desensitised to the interesting aspects of their work. It's about them getting to see the extraordinary in their ordinary work environment – it could just be footage of a digger in action, who knows? By doing so you create a team of photo journalists or videographers in your organisation. The trick, once you've embedded this culture, is to ensure you have a central vetting point to collate and review any material to ensure it ticks the boxes of health and safety, visual quality, brand values etc..
2. Invest in technology
All medium to large sized organisations, regardless of industry, should have a decent camera or tripod set up to allow employees to use smart phones as a camera effectively. While speedy turn around and opportunistic situations are encouraged, you want to prevent the situation of shoddy video being submitted the whole time. If your line of work involves working in the field or on site on a regular basis, you may even want to consider purchasing a drone camera but beware of the local regulations when operating!
3. Videos do equal business leads
Video, regardless of content, is very much the opening door to an engagement with your brand. In an increasingly cluttered digital marketing world with messages shouting at you, a raw slice-of-life video has an authenticity to it and it could be just the thing that opens the door for a future business lead or way to raise awareness with stakeholders. To look at it from a pure commercial marketing perspective, HubSpot statistics show that video on a landing page can increase conversion rates by 80%, and that 92% of mobile video consumers share videos with others.
4. Internet has no boundaries
I'd doubt anyone reading the Stuff article that prompted this blog would have heard of the Shire of Moora before this video appeared. The reality is though borderless nature of the online world means if you have something interesting or random enough to look at, you've suddenly got a global audience. We're seeing it increasingly in our social media world as within minutes of a video being posted it can end up on prime-time news. Sure, you may not be actively seeking customers offshore but you never know when awareness might lead to joint venture, a new supplier, R & D partnerships, investment – the possibilities are huge.
5. Watching machines in action is a thing
While for many watching trucks and machines in action might not be for everyone, the reality there is a huge catchment of the population out there for whom it is. There's probably some social psychological explanation for our fascination with this but just remember if it goes bang, crunch, unloads, digs or if there is a methodical, zen type movement to a factory process, chances are others will find it visually alluring. After all, there is a whole raft of reality TV out there based on that exact subject such as Ice Truckers, Megafactories etc.
Remember too, once you've sourced your gem of a moving image don't feel content to just socialise it via your own channels, why not contact The Clarity Business as we may have some ideas about getting cut through with media or to push to a larger audience.
By Luke Henshall
It's a clear reminder of the pull of seemingly mundane tasks in your day-to-day work environment which can in fact generate huge interest.
With that in mind, here's five pointers about the value of visually capturing activities and operations in your workplace.
1. Create a visually aware culture within your organisation
Educate and increase awareness within your organisation about a renewed push to create video content. It's critical this gets to your front-line staff as they are the ones who tend to get desensitised to the interesting aspects of their work. It's about them getting to see the extraordinary in their ordinary work environment – it could just be footage of a digger in action, who knows? By doing so you create a team of photo journalists or videographers in your organisation. The trick, once you've embedded this culture, is to ensure you have a central vetting point to collate and review any material to ensure it ticks the boxes of health and safety, visual quality, brand values etc..
2. Invest in technology
All medium to large sized organisations, regardless of industry, should have a decent camera or tripod set up to allow employees to use smart phones as a camera effectively. While speedy turn around and opportunistic situations are encouraged, you want to prevent the situation of shoddy video being submitted the whole time. If your line of work involves working in the field or on site on a regular basis, you may even want to consider purchasing a drone camera but beware of the local regulations when operating!
3. Videos do equal business leads
Video, regardless of content, is very much the opening door to an engagement with your brand. In an increasingly cluttered digital marketing world with messages shouting at you, a raw slice-of-life video has an authenticity to it and it could be just the thing that opens the door for a future business lead or way to raise awareness with stakeholders. To look at it from a pure commercial marketing perspective, HubSpot statistics show that video on a landing page can increase conversion rates by 80%, and that 92% of mobile video consumers share videos with others.
4. Internet has no boundaries
I'd doubt anyone reading the Stuff article that prompted this blog would have heard of the Shire of Moora before this video appeared. The reality is though borderless nature of the online world means if you have something interesting or random enough to look at, you've suddenly got a global audience. We're seeing it increasingly in our social media world as within minutes of a video being posted it can end up on prime-time news. Sure, you may not be actively seeking customers offshore but you never know when awareness might lead to joint venture, a new supplier, R & D partnerships, investment – the possibilities are huge.
5. Watching machines in action is a thing
While for many watching trucks and machines in action might not be for everyone, the reality there is a huge catchment of the population out there for whom it is. There's probably some social psychological explanation for our fascination with this but just remember if it goes bang, crunch, unloads, digs or if there is a methodical, zen type movement to a factory process, chances are others will find it visually alluring. After all, there is a whole raft of reality TV out there based on that exact subject such as Ice Truckers, Megafactories etc.
Remember too, once you've sourced your gem of a moving image don't feel content to just socialise it via your own channels, why not contact The Clarity Business as we may have some ideas about getting cut through with media or to push to a larger audience.
By Luke Henshall